Monday, March 22, 2010

Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor co-opt "progressive" opposition to war; the real anti-Empire energy is on the rebellious Right

Springtime for ObamaAnd the death of the Old Left(AntiWar.com) -- by Justin Raimondo --

...On the non-Marxist left, the triumph of the Obama cult is complete. Only the old-fashioned Leninists, such as the main organizers of the ANSWER rallies, have come out in visible opposition to Obama’s wars. Even the Marxist left, however, is not immune to Obama-mania: the other major antiwar coalition, United for Peace and Justice, led by veterans of the old Communist Party, USA, issued a euphoric statement upon Obama’s election and has been essentially moribund as an active antiwar organization ever since...

How does the antiwar movement reach what I must call, for lack of a better phrase, the Silent Majority? Back in the day, that phrase was used by the War Party and the supporters of Richard M. Nixon to characterize what they believed to be the true majority sentiment in this country: vehemently in favor of the Vietnam war, and unalterably opposed to the forces represented by the then-burgeoning antiwar movement. Today, that sort of right-wing populism, embodied by the same lower-to-middle class demographic courted by Nixon, is still around, albeit significantly changed.

The political energy, today, is on the right side of the political spectrum, where all sorts of subversive ideas are percolating in opposition to the triumvirate of Big Government, Big Business, and Big Labor that now rules the country. David Brooks, the “conservative” voice of the Establishment, is sufficiently alarmed by the rise of libertarianism to devote an entire column to its dangers. The recent victory of libertarian Ron Paul at the annual CPAC conference, where he came in first in the presidential poll, set alarm bells off in the corridors of power, where Paul’s antiwar views are anathema, and a plethora of attacks ensued from both the neoconservative right and the “progressive” left.

Paul’s organization, the Campaign for Liberty, is a real force on the right, and is recruiting members by the thousands: a great deal of this growth is coming via CfL’s youth affiliate, Young Americans for Liberty, with thousands of members on campuses nationwide and a radical flair to their organizing efforts.

Here is a substantial body of activists, committed in principle to opposing what Paul calls “the Empire,” and yet I have not seen a single effort by any of the multitude of leftist antiwar “coalitions” to reach out to them. With the exception of Cindy Sheehan, virtually all of the speakers at Saturday’s rally were from what might fairly be described as the left – or, rather, the remnants of the left not absorbed by the Obama cult. What would it cost these people to invite Ron Paul, who is hardly an obscure figure, the man who stood up to the warmongering bully Rudy Giuliani and dared confront the War Party in its Republican lair?

A sure sign that the antiwar movement is in trouble is there are more antiwar “coalitions” and less actual members and activists. It seems like every leftist grouplet under the sun has its own “broad-based” antiwar would-be umbrella group, each with only enough of a periphery to shelter itself and a few camp followers. For all the talk of “broadening” and “deepening” opposition to war, the main preoccupation of these groups seems to be using them as recruiting pools to go fishing in. It’s easy to see why some minuscule Trotskyite sect may be content with a very small pool, but surely the gravity of the issue requires a more serious approach.

I was recently asked to contribute to a symposium in The American Conservative magazine devoted to the question of whether a left-right alliance, particularly on the issue of war and peace, is either possible or desirable, and my contribution will appear in a forthcoming number. The symposium springs in part, I understand, from a conference devoted to that topic which recently took place in Washington, D.C. For all of the reasons above, and more, I believe such an alliance is not in the cards, mainly because there is no real left left to ally with anymore.

We are confronted with the spectacle of alleged “leftists” campaigning hard for a healthcare measure that forces everyone to buy insurance from the very same “big corporations” we’ve heard “progressives” rail against since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. In the meantime, on an issue which has historically been linked to the left – war – we hear either nothing, or else weepy “disappointment.”

The only protests against the bank bailout, and the corporatist tendency in general, have been generated by the right. This accounts, I believe, for the almost obsessive coverage of the movement by such pro-administration “progressive” outlets as MSNBC: the tea partiers are a funhouse mirror reflection of what the left used to be, i.e. rebels against “the System.”

A recent piece over at the “Think Progress” site bemoans what it describes as the “obsessive” coverage of the tea partiers by comparing it with the scant attention given to the antiwar rallies, which, the piece claims, were larger: it’s an arguable proposition but I’ll give them that. But so what? The war issue is now seven years old, while this latest money grab by the corporate-government axis of greed is an issue of some immediacy. Aside from that point, however, there is a larger one: the antiwar movement and the tea partiers are parallel rebellions against the same enemy – a ruling elite that uses the State to enrich itself, entrench itself, and spread its malign influence all over the world. The problem being that parallel lines have a hard time meeting.

It’s springtime for Obama, and, ironically, the autumn of the authentic left, which is fast approaching extinction...MORE...LINK